Kent State receives nearly $1 million in grants for scientific research
Kent State University has been awarded nearly $1 million for scientific research and technology.
A grant for $831,761 from the National Science Foundation will be used to teach students "to investigate ferroelectric nematic materials," which are liquid crystals used in LCD screens, for example, and how they can be utilized in other applications.
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Ferroelectric nematic materials are useful in generating green electricity and have applications in what's called "soft robotics," a robotics subfield concerning the design of robots using more flexible materials than hard plastic, ceramic, or steel.
Antal Jakli, a professor in Kent State's physics department and Advanced Materials and Liquid Crystal Institute, provided an abstract written by himself and his team that reads, "The research team’s studies on these materials aim to demonstrate new technological solutions for motion-control and energy conversion," reads the abstract.
Aditionally, the project is meant to instruct physics, chemistry and materials science students in every stage of their development. They've specifically focused on under-represented groups through the McNair Scholar and Research Experience for Undergraduates programs.
The REU provides budding scientists with training in a variety of disciplines, and gives them opportunities to pursue careers in STEM fields through faculty mentorship and scholarly research.
The second grant, worth $101,020, will be put to use expanding students' knowledge about the use of graph analysis in various research, specifically "collaborative research in an end-to-end probabilistic graph management system that will provide probabilistic graph learning, representation, aggregation, and analysis."
Probablistic graphs measure the likelihood of a certain outcome under certain conditions.
The research being conducted with this funding is a collaborative effort between Dr. Xiaofei Zhang from the University of Memphis and Dr. Xiang Lia and Dr. Qiang Guan, both from Kent State University.
Lian, an associate professor in computer science at KSU explained some of the applications for probablistic graphs in an email to the Record-Courier.
"There are many scenarios that we may encounter probabilistic graphs," Lian wrote. "For example, social networks where one user may influence one’s friends (or friends of the friends) with certain chances/probabilities, road-network graphs where traffic conditions are uncertain, knowledge graphs where relationships among resources are missing or inferred by some learning models, biological networks where genes or proteins interact with each other with some probabilities."
Their work, he wrote, has the end goal of developing an open-source software tool that researchers can put to use.
Contact reporter Derek Kreider at dkreider@gannett.com.
This article originally appeared on Record-Courier: $930,000 from the National Science Foundation to fund research at KSU
